Word: willem
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Seek My Face lets Updike imagine his way into the enigmas of that great moment in the 1950s when American art conquered the world. By way of Hope's memories, he lights upon Pollock's contemporaries--Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman--the anointed gladiators of the American avant-garde. The names are changed, but their vanities and treacheries and barroom intellectual brawls are pretty much as we know them. As for Hope, she resembles Pollock's actual wife, the steadfast Lee Krasner, though not in every detail, especially after McCoy's death, when she marries...
...Crane (Greg Kinnear) was an L.A. disc jockey. Then he became the star of the TV series Hogan's Heroes. In due course, abetted by a video geek named John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), he became a sex addict. This destroyed his career. Reduced to the dinner-theater circuit, he met lots of willing women and took pictures of them in flagrante with the equipment Carpenter supplied. Then he was murdered, almost certainly by Carpenter. Auto Focus tells this story as affectlessly as we just have. It's a conscious aesthetic choice by director Paul Schrader, not an accident of ineptitude...
...education that lasted 10 years. While doing these odd jobs, I immersed myself in the incredible artistic renaissance that was the Village in the 1950s--the Abstract Expressionist painters, the Beat Generation, the avant-garde playwrights. At the Cedar Tavern we'd meet up with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. At the Carnegie Tavern we'd sit around with Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter and talk music. Seeing my first Beckett play, my first Genet play--they were revelatory. They showed me that theater didn't have to be what I had known thus far. They opened things...
...this film, Hogan's Heroes star Bob Crane (embodied here with scary blandness by Greg Kinnear) was a sex addict who enjoyed having his erotic acts recorded on video by a technician (Willem Dafoe) who often joined Crane in four-way frolics. As a cut-rate American satyr, Crane was Hugh Hefner without the mansion or the moves. And Paul Schrader's clinical docu-comedy is as grim as an autopsy after an electrocution...
...faithful to a fault. Spidey, a.k.a. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), is still the teen dweeb from Queens with a crush on the girl next door (Kirsten Dunst), a dose of genetically altered spider DNA in his veins and a compulsion to save the world from the gaudy Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). Sure, he can leap tall buildings with several sticky bounds, but he's also nearly grounded by a load of unresolved guilt. Plenty of classic heroes--Oedipus, Hamlet, Luke Skywalker--are obliged to kill a father figure; by the time this movie is over, Peter is responsible...